Thomas R. Donahue - Early Life

Early Life

Born and raised in the Bronx in New York City, Donahue is the son of Thomas R. and Mary E. Donahue and the grandson of Irish immigrants. As the New York Times noted, he “came of age at a time when unions were helping deliver New Yorkers from the Depression and were perceived as a beacon for many young people.”

Donahue was first drawn to the trade union movement after he saw how much his father’s wages jumped when he went from being a nonunion janitor to a unionized construction worker. The younger Donahue worked as a Best & Company department store elevator operator, a schoolbus driver, a bakery worker, and a doorman at Radio City Music Hall.

He graduated from Manhattan College in 1949 with a degree in labor relations. Donahue’s union career actually started a year before that when he became a part-time organizer for the Retail Clerks International Association. From 1949 to 1957, he held several positions with Local 32B, the flagship local of the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU), including business agent, education director, contractor director, and publications editor. Meanwhile, he attended night classes at Fordham Law School and received his law degree in 1956.

In 1957, he became the European labor program coordinator for the Free Europe Committee in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1960 to take a position as executive assistant to David Sullivan, the newly elected president of the BSEIU.

Many years later, Donahue would tell interviewers that Sullivan “remains my hero in the trade union movement. He was an Irish immigrant who came here in 1926 and was an elevator operator at the start, and became active in the union. He then led the reform faction in the union to oust a racket-dominated leadership.”

Donahue was nominated by President Lyndon Johnson as Assistant Secretary for Labor-Management Relations in the Labor Department in 1967. He served in that position until the end of the Johnson administration in 1969, then returned to the Service Employees International Union, as it was by then called, where he served as executive secretary and later first vice-president.

He became executive assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, in 1973.